Building Developer Tools at the Right Level of Abstraction

Developer tools that want to solve problem for a wide range of use cases live or die by their abstraction level. Go too specific then you’re only useful to a select few, but go too general then it doesn’t solve anything useful for anyone. At Gather we are building a dev tool for creating data pipelines that pull from many different data sources, so how we choose our abstraction level is vitally important. In this talk I’ll discuss how we approached the problem and why our unique take on visual programming is an ideal abstraction for data collection and processing.